Functional Magic and Subsequent Word Nerdery

My buddy’s climate-art non-profit (climart nonprof? clart nip? canp?), Functional Magic, has lately been making use of the various talents of my wife and myself. He and I…”collabbed”…on a blog post about political art.

I just noticed that the dumb word “collab",” short for “collaboration,” if spelled and pronounced “colab,” would also make colloquial sense—it would mean “we do our laboratory work together,” which has a bit of a different sense for American English ears, I think, although it’s etymologically identical and boils down to the same thing. But I like the idea that we’re all at work in our little laboratories and then sometimes we “lab” together.